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5 - Transatlantic Radicalism and the Land Question

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2023

Andrew Phemister
Affiliation:
Newcastle University
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Summary

This chapter tracks the impact of George and the Land War on some of the central ideological currents of the period, revealing how the transatlantic Land War came to occupy its fractious place in liberal political thinking. It suggests the importance of George’s radical campaigns and the Irish land agitation in accelerating acceptance of the more technocratic sightlines of new liberalism and economic marginalism. Pressed by the destabilising threat of demands for access to land grounded in natural rights, liberal political thinkers discarded the last vestiges of the tradition’s democratic-republican heritage in favour of a statist and ostensibly ‘value-free’ perspective enunciated in a language of scientific authority. Henry George’s social and intellectual networks are examined, as well as the work of liberal political theorists dealing with the land question, George, and the Irish crisis. The chapter argues that the contradictions between liberty and property – between natural freedoms and private accumulation – that the Land War exposed forced liberalism to finally and more fully dispose of its older individualistic assumptions in order to protect social order, property, ‘progress’, and ‘civilization’.

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Chapter
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Land and Liberalism
Henry George and the Irish Land War
, pp. 153 - 187
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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